So I have been evaluating the flexibility of existing digital repository software tools and decided to install the Eprints Ubuntu package via apt-get –I must say, I was rather impressed with the package. Not only does it work flawlessly, but the overall installation process is so very user friendly. All software dependencies are automatically installed during the installation process –including configuration of third party component tools such as MySQL. It took me less than 30 minutes to set it up on my local machine and all I had to do is follow the steps below.

STEP 1: Add APT mirros to sourcelist
The latest stable release builds are located here [1] and including them to the sourcelist is trivial –all that needs to be done is edit the soruces.list file and add the appropriate build (note line 12 below).

Don’t worry about the warning on “missing LSB information”; its something that is trivial and is a well documented [2, 3] warning message.

STEP 4: Go to eprints user home directory and run scripts
You need to switch users and login as eprints user to run the neccessary scripts that will create and configure the database and also create an archive.

phiri@PHRLIG001:~$ sudo su eprints
[sudo] password for phiri:
eprints@PHRLIG001:/home/phiri$ cd
eprints@PHRLIG001:~$ pwd
/usr/share/eprints3
eprints@PHRLIG001:~$ ./bin/epadmin create
Create an EPrint Repository
Please select an ID for the repository, which will be used to create a directory
and identify the repository. Lower case letters and numbers, may not start with
a number. examples: "lemurprints" or "test3"
Archive ID?
:
:

eprints@PHRLIG001:~$ ./bin/epadmin --version
epadmin 3.3.7 [Schema 3.3.2]
Copyright 2000-2011 University of Southampton.
This file is part of EPrints L<http://www.eprints.org/>.
EPrints is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
EPrints is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT
ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public
License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with EPrints. If not, see L<http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
eprints@PHRLIG001:~$